EP12: Mindjacked: Inherited Patterns on Repeat
Neuroception, Survival Traps, and the Path to Agency
Inherited patterns are learned behaviours.
Most of us like to think of ourselves as autonomous, self-determining individuals, making choices based on reason and preference. But the deeper I’ve gone into this work, the clearer it’s become that much of who we are is conditioned, programmed, inherited. Not all of the patterns we live by are our own.
Survival Traps
Developmental and attachment research shows we learn patterns as a fundamental survival strategy.1
Human beings are born completely dependent on others. It takes years before we are even remotely independent. Now imagine this in the context of a world dominated by nature, where humans are not the apex being. In that world, you learn the patterns you need quickly or you die.
You learn …
How to belong.
How to avoid danger.
How to stay fed.
How not to be abandoned.
There is no time for reflection or discernment. Pattern learning happens first. Choice comes much later, if it comes at all.
This is important to understand, because as debilitating as they can be, inherited patterns are not flaws, they are adaptations. They were once necessary. They worked. They kept someone alive.
Wired to Fire
These patterns don’t live primarily in our beliefs or our thoughts; they are encoded in the body, in automatic nervous‑system responses that fire before we are consciously aware of them.
They activate before we think. Before we reason. Before we can apply logic or evidence.
Experimental studies show that bodily threat responses can activate fractions of a second before conscious awareness or deliberate reasoning has a chance to come online.2
That’s why they feel compulsive, overwhelming, even possessive. That’s why insight alone so often fails to dissolve them.
In polyvagal theory, neuroception3 is a process that distinguishes between what is safe, dangerous, and life‑threating. It happens below awareness, without deliberate thinking, and decides whether to move toward connection, fight/flight, or shutdown.
More than just a belief problem; it’s a physiological inheritance.
This helps explain why insight alone rarely dissolves these patterns: the body has already ‘decided’ before the mind weighs in.
Compassion and Lineage
Everyone inherits.
The patterns we carry often reflect what those before us had to do to survive, and research on intergenerational trauma suggests these survival strategies can echo across multiple generations.4 This is a long line of survival, one we should actually feel grateful for. Without it, none of us would be here.
The tragedy isn’t inheritance. It’s when unresolved survival strategies are passed on unchanged, long after the original danger has gone.
That’s where responsibility comes in, not as blame, but as opportunity.
Mindjacked
So how do you tell you’re running inherited patterns? There are a couple of strong indicators that a pattern may not be authentically yours.
One is a contradiction of your own values. You see the world one way, but you react in another. The response doesn’t align with who you believe yourself to be.
The other is a sense of compulsion or possession.
The reaction feels involuntary and urgent, as if a threat has been detected. A narrowing of focus, a hijacking of your nervous system. As if something has taken control of you.
That combination, value contradiction and compulsive force, is a strong signal.
But in all honesty, it doesn’t really matter whether a pattern is inherited or formed through your own experience. Ultimately, it’s with you. And you are the one with the opportunity to recognise it, to become aware of it, to attend to it, and to accept it.
You can move through it.
The Pattern
For a long time, whenever a parcel didn’t arrive on time, a refund got delayed, or a payment didn’t come through when it was supposed to, I would become extremely agitated.
In nervous‑system language, my body was acting as if a serious threat was present, even when the situation was minor or easily fixable.
I couldn’t focus on anything else. It was like being possessed. All of my energy narrowed into a laser focussing on what was happening in my body and mind.
Total energetic agitation. It was exhausting to experience.
There was always a mental narrative running alongside it: I was going to be cheated. These people were dishonest. I shouldn’t have trusted them. This always happens.
There was even a kind of smugness to it - I told you so.
It was so debilitating that I couldn’t do anything else until the problem was resolved. And if there was nothing I could do but wait, it felt like running a marathon until it was finally sorted. I’d struggle to sleep, eat, even speak to other people.
Danger, Will Robinson!
With hindsight, it’s almost ridiculous.
Ninety-five percent of the time, the problem was resolved quickly. An email. Proof of payment. Following the right support channel. Logic and patience did the job.
And yet, the pattern continued to play out.
I was very aware that this wasn’t a rational assessment of risk; it was a conditioned threat response.
This Isn’t Me
Over the past couple of months this pattern has played out a couple of times. Delays, undelivered items, missing money, but something was different.
Instead of feeling like this is me, it began to feel like this is happening to me.
Something unfamiliar about the pattern stood out. Something not-me. Then it dawned on me: this wasn’t mine.
This was my dad.
This kind of transmission is intergenerational learning: we absorb our caregivers’ beliefs about danger, trust, and scarcity both through what they say and how they react under stress.
The Inheritance
When I was younger, my father would explode in rage whenever something felt like he was being cheated or robbed, or when he thought he was about to lose something of value.
Later in my life, when I was in my thirties, he told me outright: you should never trust anyone when it comes to money. Everyone is out to steal from you. No one can be trusted.
He had lost his savings, his job, his wife, his home, and his will to live in a very short period of time. Given that context, his worldview makes sense.
But hearing it only reinforced a pattern I’d already inherited from him.
Even though I could see the cynicism, it resonated as true. And it stayed with me for years.
Agency
What I can see now is that while the pattern may not have originated with me, my current response to it is very much mine, and that’s where my agency lives.
What’s actually mine is the ability to find solutions. A realistic belief that most problems are errors or mistakes, sometimes incompetence, but very rarely malicious intent.
This is what I mean by an inherited pattern: something that takes enormous amounts of energy and time, causes pain and frustration, and isn’t even part of your authentic self.
We adopt these patterns because we are human: we inherit them to fit in, to belong, to stay safe, and to respond quickly to threat, even when the threat is no longer real.
Off Map
The difficulty is that when you leave a pattern, you go off the map.
Patterns don’t like that. They pull you back. They ignore counter-evidence. They insist on familiarity over truth.
Old patterns run on momentum; in learning terms, they are well‑established neural and emotional grooves that naturally take time and repetition to soften.
Studies of emotional learning suggest that new experiences of safety do not erase old threat memories; instead, the new learning sits alongside them, which is why it can feel like ‘going off the map’ for a while.
Note: There is no need to make a problem out of our problems. The work isn’t to fight the pattern, but to stop feeding it.
To get off the hamster wheel.
What Remains
What I’m learning to do is identify what isn’t mine and release it.
To become aware
To pay attention with love
To accept without resignation or the desire to change
No doubt, I’ll then have to go through the same process again with patterns that are my own, formed in response to my own experiences, and no longer serving me.
Because underneath the inheritance, the conditioning, and the survival strategies, there is something else: a more enduring sense of self that isn’t defined only by what we had to do to survive.
The real me.
And that is who I’m getting to know.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7945765/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9382976/
https://hopehealingcounseling.com/neuroception-the-unconscious-sensing-that-shapes-our-safety/
https://iptrauma.org/docs/trauma/intergenerational-transgenerational-trauma/